“I feel that we’ve met before”. A simple observation from one man to another ignites Lucio Castro’s End of the Century. Ocho, an Argentinean poet-slash-airline-marketer from New York arrives at an AirBnB in Barcelona to spend a few days exploring the city on his own, wordlessly walking the peaceful streets and taking photos with his iPhone. He goes to the beach and watches a man stand up from his towel and head to the shoreline. Attracted to him, Ocho follows him into the sea, keeping close enough to be visible but far enough away to be unobtrusive, and, when he returns to the shore, Ocho does the same a few moments later, only to see the man pack up his things and ride off on a moped. Loneliness is a disruptive force in Ocho’s life. It’s clear he’s looking for some kind of connection in Barcelona, but with no family in this town, no friends, no reason to be here, his explorations lose much of their direction and begin to feel like those of a lost man rather than a curious one. He’s adrift. He’s guided around the city by maps on his phone, and he goes home to an empty apartment built for travellers.
But an impulsive chance reunion with Javi, the man from the beach, changes everything: they have sex, go for lunch, and talk openly and directly about their lives over rooftop drinks in the short space of an afternoon. Their conversation flows freely, the connection between them impossible to miss, and Ocho wonders whether they’ve met before. “We have met before”, Javi replies, and, as soon as the words leave his mouth, Castro’s film suddenly jumps back in time and picks up two-decades prior to recount a brief, to some extent forgotten encounter between the two men, a piece of history that set the course for both their lives. Castro chooses to frame the past in the context of the present, and he traces a bittersweet line from Ocho and Javi’s respective twenty-something idealism to their mid-life hesitations without changing anything on the surface. There is no title card to mark the new era, neither man appears any older or younger in either time period, as if time stopped for them as they danced to A Flock of Seagulls, and Castro resists the urge to switch up the visuals and give each era a new texture, shooting everything, old and new, in lingering, soft-focus two-shots. The only difference between now and then is that we know this relationship doesn’t last, but that it could have done in different circumstances. On their first day alone together, they visit a museum and walk between paintings and sculptures, art that has endured for centuries and will outlive them both. Javi describes a painting in the museum to Ocho, who responds by saying he doesn’t need to see it now. Things change, things stay the same. An imagined parallel timeline, in which the two men live a life together built on the details of the lives they have lived separately, comes and goes in a fit of regret at what could have been, but, rather than dwelling on the painful questions of the past, Castro instead looks to the only unknown that Ocho can control: the future. A fleeting display of fireworks illuminate the Barcelona skyline before fading into its darkness, leaving behind an imprint of where light used to be and the looming dawn of the new day to come.
Klaudia Reynicke’s Love Me Tender takes a very different approach to history. In the wake of a long-repressed family trauma, Seconda, a woman in her early thirties, suffers from agoraphobia and hasn’t left her parents’ house in nine months. She has a spiky relationship with both her mother and father, who seem to have run out of patience with their daughter. She wildly rides an exercise bike, hisses at the cat, and dances violently in her bedroom to the point that her things fall from the shelves, slamming doors and aggressively pushing her mother and father away. When they both suddenly abandon her, Seconda is left entirely alone to fend for herself. Her medication runs out and she has no way to get more of it. A man violently harasses her with threatening phone calls about her father’s unpaid debts, and she runs out of food. No longer able to live passively, Seconda has to consider whether she’s able to finally go outside.
For the film’s first half, Reynicke’s camera never once leaves the apartment, pinning Seconda in small rooms with closed curtains and holding the camera close to her face, panning quickly to follow her erratic movements. As Seconda gradually builds up the courage to tell herself that she’s ready, the outside slowly starts to come to her: first as light, then air, objects, and, finally, as people. It’s a simple escalation that shows how, free from the suffocating influence of her parents, she’s finally able to confront her fears on her own. Once she leaves, Reynicke shifts gears, with the film’s second half designed to showcase the absurdity of the world Seconda has barricaded herself from. Weird, almost surreal encounters seem to follow her around, drawn perhaps to the turquoise onesie she wears as armour and the stiff-limbed, alien way in which she marches from place to place: a young girl torments and insults her wherever she goes, people laugh at her appearance in the supermarket, and the man who threatened her over the phone turns up at her door to apologise, only to suddenly profess his love for her with childish fervour (“I like your cool cat face”) before, on her rejection, resorting to increasingly sexual vulgarities. This world, one filled with near-constant chaos and hostility, is not one that Seconda seems to fit into. It’s a shame that Reynicke doesn’t interrogate this environment, instead sending Seconda on an absurd odyssey within it, seemingly constructed to double-down on the idea that the world is the cause of Seconda’s problems, rather than how these problems have arisen because of it. There are hints of a more interesting story in the sudden reappearance of her father and his role in the tragedy of her past, but these moments are lost in the shuffle. As such, it’s Seconda’s defiant spirit that shines in Love Me Tender, one best encapsulated by a simple throwaway remark: “I’ve got a very strong survival instinct, unfortunately.”